Abstract
We perceive a world of mind-independent macroscopic material objects such as stones, tables, trees, and animals. Our experience is the joint upshot of the way these things are and our route through them, along with the various relevant circumstances of perception; and it depends on the normal operation of our perceptual systems. How should we characterise our perceptual experience so as to respect its basis and explain its role in grounding empirical thought and knowledge? I offered an answer to this question in Perception and its objects (Brewer 2011). Here I aim to clarify some of my central arguments and to develop and defend the position further in the light of subsequent critical discussion.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
I am grateful to many colleagues and students for very helpful discussions of the book since its publication. Here I draw especially on excellent contributions to an Author Meets Critics symposium on Perception and Its Objects at the 2014 Central APA in Chicago by Berit Brogaard and Adam Pautz. Previous versions of this material were also presented at workshops in Trondheim and Antwerp. Many thanks to all the participants for helpful discussion at these events. Particular thanks to the following for their suggestions. Louise Antony, John Campbell, Craig French, Kathrin Glüer, Carsten Hansen, David Hilbert, Jonathan Knowles, Heather Logue, Brian McLaughlin, Mike Martin, Bence Nanay, Anders Nes, Thomas Raleigh, Susanna Schellenberg, and Wayne Wu. I am also very grateful for two excellent sets of comments from anonymous reviewers for Topoi. The revisions that I have had the space and ability to make here in the light of their comments have made a significant improvement. Other issues remain for further work.
See Martin (2010) for an alternative development of the slogan on which looks are intrinsic properties of perceivable worldly objects rather than anything dependent on the perceiver’s point of view and circumstances.
This may require qualification. Perhaps there are attempted ‘category mistake’ contents that do not succeed in even representing an object of one category as possessing a property appropriate to a quite different category of object, and perhaps genuinely entertaining the content that a is F is not possible in the absence of a broadly accurate conception of what kind of thing a is. I do not take a stand on either of these suggestions here for the limits on error that they impose are relatively minimal. The limits on error compatible with experiential presentation are still significantly more demanding.
Here and throughout I use the notion of a content, p, concerning an object, o, very broadly, to include at least the ideas that p involves singular reference to o and that o is relevant to the evaluation of p because o (uniquely) satisfies certain general conditions explicitly mentioned in p’s truth-conditions, perhaps along with certain causal conditions on the particular entertaining of p in question. The relevance of this breadth will emerge in Sect. 2.2 below.
Perhaps there are extraordinary circumstances in which this is possible. But this simply sharpens rather than blunts the objection, for (OV) does and (CV) does not offer an explanatory account of what such extraordinary circumstances must achieve.
This objection is due to Pautz.
There are no doubt further necessary conditions required for joint sufficiency according to (CV). I discuss the introduction of causal conditions in Sect. 2.2 below.
The analogy, like the objection, is due to Pautz.
See Sect. 3.1 below for further discussion of the precise opposition between (OV) and (CV).
This evaluation of the current argument depends on my characterisation of (CV) as the thesis that perception consists most fundamentally in our representation of things as being thus and so in the mind-independent world around us. An alternative to (CV) so construed might accept that perception is not itself most fundamentally a matter of representation, but nevertheless insist that the experiential aspect of perception is fundamentally representational. This move requires a distinction between perception itself, which may not ultimately be a matter of representation at all, and perceptual experience, which is. I resist this distinction, although of course I do not assume from the outset that perceptual experience is object-involving. The phenomenon about whose fundamental nature I take (OV) and (CV) to be offering alternative accounts is precisely our conscious perception of the world around us. That fundamental nature should, as I explained at the outset, provide at least the basis for a unified account of the phenomenology of perception and its role in making thought and knowledge of the world possible. If any such unified account is demonstrably impossible, then it might be necessary to divide and conquer broadly perceptual phenomena. But I take the primary debate here to concern the possibility and shape of unified views.
Might it be possible for (CV) simply to take over this (OV) account of the errors compatible with seeing? Certainly, if the (OV) proposal is correct, then the stipulation of an additional necessary condition on seeing o that o be represented as F from a point of view and in circumstances where o has visually relevant similarities with paradigm exemplars of F will be extensionally adequate. But, unlike (OV), (CV) has absolutely no explanation of why this should be the correct additional condition on their view. I claim that this makes the proposed stipulation unacceptably ad hoc in the current context, and especially so in comparison to the motivated unity of (OV).
In his APA comments Pautz suggests a different response, again aiming to limit (CV) proponents’ explanatory commitments. The proposal conjoins the thesis that seeing o involves experientially entertaining an appropriately accurate content concerning o that is appropriately caused by o with the insistence that no explanation can or need be given of what appropriate causation may be: it is simply that causal involvement that makes experiential entertaining into vision. I reply as above (Sect. 2.1) that this may be motivated in the context of (OV), according to which conscious acquaintance with o is basic, from a point of view and in circumstances in which o derivatively looks F, for a whole range of F. If we collect together a set of situations in which it is for a person as if something looks F and ask the question what more is the case in some of these situations in virtue of which the subject actually sees a worldly object o, then we may reasonably answer simply that these are the situations in which it is as if something looks F because o looks F and she is acquainted with o from a point of view and in circumstances in which it has visually relevant similarities with paradigm exemplars of F. There is no need for any kind of explanation of the specific kind of causal involvement that o has in her experiential condition. (CV), on the other hand, takes the condition of experientially entertaining a content concerning o as basic and admits that in some, but not all, of the cases in which this obtains, the subject sees o. The suggestion that these are the cases in which o is causally involved in the explanation of her experientially entertaining the relevant content in such a way as to make it the case that she sees it, whatever exactly that way may be, is at the very least an unhelpful and uninformative addition. If nothing better could possibly be done, then perhaps one could learn to live with the disappointment. But this is absolutely not the situation. In any case, the primary focus of my objection here is independent of that adjudication.
This issue clearly interacts closely with debates concerning internalism versus externalism about thought content. I regard these as helpfully organised around the following inconsistent triad: (1) Content supervenes upon what is subjectively accessible; (2) What is subjectively accessible superveness upon (physical) condition from the skin in; (3) Content does not supervene upon (physical) condition from the skin in. Orthodox internalists (e.g. Searle 1983) accept (1) and (2) and reject (3) along with the various Putnam/Burge-style thought-experiments that motivate (3). Orthodox externalists (e.g. Putnam 1975 and Burge 1979) accept (2) and (3) and reject (1) along with the kind of restriction governing understanding that I endorse here. My own reaction, following McDowell as I understand him (esp. Pettit and McDowell 1986, Introduction; McDowell 1986), is to accept (1) and (3) and reject (2).
Supporters of (CV) may at this point invoke a distinction between different modes of reference to particulars. Judgement, with reflective understanding, involves fully conceptual reference, whereas perceptual experiential content involves only non-conceptual reference. Thus, the contents that are constitutive of the fundamental nature of perceptual experience may without circularity explain our capacity for reference to worldly particulars in judgement. I have two doubts about this proposal. First, I stand by the general objections to characterizing perceptual experience in terms of non-conceptual representational content advanced elsewhere (esp. 1999, ch. 5). Second, the revised (CV) account is still without any non-circular explanation of the mode of genuine reference to particulars that is supposedly involved in that very experience. Yet the initial explanatory datum apparently remains in force: any capacity that we may have for perceptually-based reference of any kind to particular mind-independent objects is to be explained on the basis of the nature of our conscious perception of those very things.
It is of course open to proponents of (CV) to expand their palette by invoking multiple layers of contents available in perception in order to accommodate both the rich and intricately nested thin looks, and the interest-dependent specific thick looks that worldly objects have in perception. But this still leaves a challenge to explain the unity and grounding of this complex superstructure of perceptual contents in the fundamental nature of the experiences that bear them. See Peacocke’s (1992) appeal to both scenario and proto-propositional levels of non-conceptual content for what is perhaps the most powerful and fully worked out such (CV) account.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for Topoi for pressing this line of concern.
Travis (2004) presents an important and influential argument also exploiting this phenomenon against the idea that perception has representational content along the lines proposed by (CV).
See Brewer (2011, ch. 6) for a full discussion of the (OV) account of determinate perceptual knowledge.
This question and the discussion that follows are prompted by Brogaard’s comments at the Chicago APA.
I entirely acknowledge that this response is far too brief as it stands to refute the very idea of a no-priority view. Each such account deserves extended and detailed discussion on its own merits. My stand for present purposes is on the insistence that the appeal to an equally fundamental and independent content characterisation of perception is motivated only to the extent that the (OV) account of looks is demonstrably unsatisfactory. I aim to show in Sects. 3.2 and 3.3 below that this is not obviously the case.
This objection is due to Brogaard.
Brogaard makes the objection in her Chicago APA comments.
Notice that the case of hallucination is, as it were, the limiting case of this explanation. In every other case, introspective indistinguishability is grounded in the presence of the same visually relevant similarities between pairs of cases of acquaintance with different worldly objects from different points of view and/or in different perceptual circumstances. Pure hallucination is the residual case in which there is nothing except for the fact that the subject’s condition is not distinguishable by introspection alone from a case of acquaintance with a given qualitative scene from a specific point of view, ungrounded in actual acquaintance with anything.
What I present here is the barest sketch of an argument, glossing over numerous serious issues and difficulties. I intend to develop the argument in detail elsewhere, but I hope that this rough and ready presentation at least indicates the direction of thought and the challenge facing the bottom-up approach.
See Footnote 29 below for the top-down (OV) recognition of the fact that all the experiences in a given equivalence class have something in common, although this is absolutely not their fundamental nature and is in all but the totally hallucinatory case intelligibly grounded in their fundamental nature as conscious acquaintance with worldly objects from various points of view in various circumstances.
Note, as indicated in Footnote 28 above, that all experiences in a given equivalence class share the property of being introspectively indistinguishable from the condition of conscious perceptual acquaintance with specific worldly objects from a specific point of view in specific circumstances. In all but the totally hallucinatory case, this is grounded in some such conscious worldly acquaintance. In the totally hallucinatory case it is simply ungrounded.
See Brewer (2011, ch. 5) for more on the phenomenology of thick looks.
Since the distinction I propose between perception of fuzzy objects and blurred perception of sharp objects is made at the level of thick looks, it depends on the registration of visually relevant similarities. Nevertheless, as pointed out in Sect. 1 above, I happily acknowledge the existence of less cognitively demanding modes of registration than the fully conceptual paradigm. So the distinction is perfectly available in the case of non-concept-using animals.
Thanks to Berit Brogaard for raising this case in her Chicago APA comments.
References
Allen K (2013) Blur. Philos Stud 162:257–273
Brewer B (1999) Perception and reason. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Brewer B (2011) Perception and its objects. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Brogaard B (2011) Are there unconscious perceptual processes? Conscious Cogn 20: 449–463
Brogaard B (2014) Comments on Bill Brewer, Perception and its objects. APA Author Meets Critics, Chicago
Burge T (1979) Individualism and the Mental. In: French P, Uehling T, Wettstein H (eds) Midwest studies in philosophy, IV. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis
Campbell J (2002a) Berkeley’s Puzzle. In: Szabo Gendler T, Hawthorne J (eds) Conceivability and possibility. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Campbell J (2002b) Reference and consciousness. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Child W (1994) Causality, interpretation, and the mind. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Dretske F (1981) Knowledge and the flow of information. MIT Press, Cambridge
Eilan N (1998) Perceptual intentionality, attention, and consciousness. In: O’Hear A (ed) Current issues in philosophy of mind. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Fodor J (1987) Psychosemantics: the problem of meaning in the philosophy of mind. MIT Press, Cambridge
Foley R (2012) Type-2 blindsight, self-attribution, and qualia: a problem for qualia-based accounts of blindsight. Philosophical writings. In: Proceedings of the fifteenth annual British postgraduate philosophy conference pp. 47–55
French C (2014) Naïve realist perspectives on seeing blurrily. Ratio (Special Issue: The Structure of Perceptual Experience. Guest Editor: Stazicker J.) 27:393-413
Grice HP (1961) The causal theory of perception. Proc Aristot Soc Suppl 35:121–153
Hyman J (1992) The causal theory of perception. Philos Q 42:277–296
Lewis D (1980) Veridical hallucination and prosthetic vision. Aust J Philos 58:239–249
Martin MGF (2010) What’s in a look? In: Nanay B (ed) Perceiving the world. Oxford University Press, Oxford
McDowell J (1986) Singular thought and the extent of inner space. In: Pettit P, McDowell J (eds) Subject, thought, and context. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Millikan R (1984) Language, thought, and other biological categories. MIT Press, Cambridge
Pautz A (2010) Why explain visual experience in terms of content? In: Nanay B (ed) Perceiving the world. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Pautz A (2014) The object view and the content view: Comments on Brewer, Perception and its objects. APA Author Meets Critics, Chicago
Peacocke C (1992) A study of concepts. MIT Press, Cambridge
Pears DF (1976) The causal conditions of perception. Synthese 33:25–40
Pettit P, McDowell J (eds) (1986) Subject, thought, and context. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Putnam H (1975) The meaning of meaning. In: Putnam H (ed) Mind, language, and reality. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Roessler J, Lerman H, Eilan N (eds) (2011) Perception, causation, and objectivity. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Searle J (1983) Intentionality: an essay in the philosophy of mind. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Smith AD (2008) Translucent experiences. Philos Stud 140:197–212
Snowdon P (1980) Perception, vision, and causation. Proc Aristot Soc 81:175–192
Strawson PF (1979) Perception and its objects. In: MacDonald GF (ed) Perception and identity: essays presented to A. J. Ayer. Macmillan, London
Sullivan-Bissett E (2012) Changing approaches to blindsight: relevant but not decisive. Philosophical writings. In: Proceedings of the fifteenth annual British postgraduate philosophy conference pp. 56-60
Travis C (2004) The silence of the senses. Mind 113:57–94
Tye M (1995) Ten problems of consciousness: a representational theory of mind. MIT Press, Cambridge
Tye M (2000) Consciousness, colour, and content. MIT Press, Cambridge
Tye M (2003) Blurry images, double vision, and other oddities: new problems for representationalism? In: Smith Q, Jokic A (eds) Conscousness: new philosophical perspectives. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Weiskrantz L (1986) Blindsight: a case study and its implications. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Williamson T (1995) Is knowing a stage of mind? Mind 105:533–565
Williamson T (2002) Knowledge and its limits. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Brewer, B. The Object View of Perception. Topoi 36, 215–227 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-015-9310-y
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-015-9310-y